I’ve felt weirdly sad over the last few days and was about to offer some new droopy tale or other here today – until saw this post that my new friend and fellow blogger Brian Moloney wrote, saying how he’s been writing for exactly a year now and mentioning me in the course of his remarks.

He also quoted an excerpt from Salinger’s Franny and Zooey that brought back everything I so earnestly hoped and dreamed that I might do with my life, even back in junior high. It’s what came to me when I finally stopped obsessing about how funny-looking I was with my chapped lips and my too-short bangs.

You can read his whole post here but I’ll just say it begins by describing how, just a year ago now, he was wondering if he really could go on puttin’ it out there every day when he came upon my name.  He says he wrote me on a day when he was ‘on the verge of chucking the whole thing’ – and it seems I wrote  back, promising that I for one would read him every day and that the two of us would be go on to be friends forever.

“And surprisingly, nearly a year later, we are well on our way to being just that: forever friends,” he says.

“Even though I have never met her -  “You know, because of the restraining order,” he adds in his jokey way.

“I have never mentioned her or thanked her before on this thing but I thought this was a good time to do it,” he goes on. “I won’t go into a lot of details but the truth is—if it weren’t for this lady with the odd Boston accent, I probably wouldn’t have made it to a month…let alone a year.” (Nice man! And he’s right too: I do have an odd Boston accent as people keep telling me when they come across that little video I once made.) He says that we’re different because I’m more forthcoming about myself in what I write but still: we have in common the fact that “as difficult as it can be on any given day to put something worthwhile down on a page, we do it for the fat lady sitting on the porch swatting flies.”

That’s the Salinger reference which I think means we do it out of some mystical blend of faith and love.

He recommends we all go to the last few pages of Franny and Zooey to see what he’s talking about.  And then we should go to the first page and read the whole thing, something we should have done a long time ago.

I did read the book a long time ago and was completely knocked out by its message – before I forgot about it for almost 50 years.

It just goes to show you that old theory about life is true: You really can’t see yourself, yourself. Emily Dickinson knew this. “The Mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly,” is how she put it. You really can’t know what effect you have in the world. It takes some kindly watching Other to do that for you.

“Where do you GET this stuff?” a reader recently wrote me, after reading that post I did about contraceptive methods at the time of the Titanic, and all I could tell him was the truth: The universe delivers it fresh to me every day, the same way milk once was once delivered, the bottles clinking together in their metal crates.

The idea for that particular post came from the National Geographic Society, whose electronic eyes and ears had ‘noticed’  I’d been wandering the decks of that long-submerged craft on YouTube and decided to forge a bond with me.

I got an email in other words, with a video clip showing a couple of archivists talking about those difficult days when a doctor they cited as having given birth control advice was banned from practicing medicine for having done so.

Other ideas cross my radar in other ways, just as they do with all of us: We overhear a bit of conversation. We open our eyes just as a Canada Goose zooms past our bedroom window, showing the intricate weave of feather and sinew that lets him soar. One fall morning we look at our accustomed across-the-street view to see trees so fiery in color they look like a gathering of redheads.

I can hold onto sights such as these if I go right to my keyboard and set them down, and in such a way that a reader can almost see what I saw, or feel something like what I felt. Then I try to write the way people talk. I try to write the way a teacher talks when he or she is trying to make you feel happy you came to class. Happy and safe and undaunted by the fact that today you’ll be starting that four-week unit on Macbeth.

Undaunted because the teacher will be with you the whole way, as will your pals in the seats around you.

Undaunted because you trust by now that this teacher won’t single you out or send you to the board to drill you with hard questions.

I mean yes, it’s Shakespeare and yes, the language takes some getting used to with ‘an’ sometimes meaning ‘if’ and ‘marry’ meaning ‘By Mary!’ or in our parlance ‘By God!’ but if you hear it read out loud or see it acted, the meaning breaks upon you.

Anyway, no one will blame you if you don’t quite catch it the first time.  Certainly there’s no shame there. Think of the child who thought The Star Spangled Banner had a line in about ‘bums bursting in air.’ Or that poor soul who got the words to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds wrong, really belting it out when he reached the part where ‘the girl with colitis goes by” – and  apparently never even wondering what an affliction like that was doing in a Beatles song.

But hey, some of the best fun you can have in life comes out of how wrong you get things. I think of the time I mistakenly poured cat kibble instead of laundry detergent into the washing machine.  And the time my little daughter wondered aloud about that old Daryll Hall song. You know the one surely: Where he’s saying “every time you go away you take a piece of meat with you“?

So where do I get this stuff? The world just delivers it up, like those milkmen of yore with their clinking bottles. All I have to do is be there to receive it.

Somebody had a comment on my post about shoulder pads, asking why you never hear about padding in men’s suits – to which I say yeah, why DON’T you ever hear about men’s shoulder padding, without which most guys would look like Martin Short’s Ed Grimley from Saturday Night Live. Or like this guy at the left here?

They need those suit jackets to look strong and mighty. If men just went around in their shirt sleeves like this guy you wouldn’t give a nickel for them. They’d just remind you of Ashley Wilkes from Gone With the Wind, and you know HE wasn’t the one sweeping Scarlett off her feet like old Rhett Butler did and why? An insufficiency about the shoulders.

Maybe that was a lesson to everyone who saw the movie. Maybe that’s why in every decade since it came out in 1939, shoulder pads have been very much in evidence.

They were in the 30s:

In the 1940s too, as seen in this family grouping where a couple of members appear to have lost their heads:

The styles remained similar in the 1950s and 1960s though what’s going on with the coquettish look and the barely suppressed smirk between these two at the airport? What’s the REAL story behind that glimpse of the lady’s dainty washables?

It’s true men’s fashions took a strange turn in the 70s….

but then they returned to form and stayed there…

Pretty convincing proof if you ask me: Guys’ and their egos just need padding – what else was the codpiece for? And now Ed Grimley himself, natural shoulders and all:

After I hit a thousand posts on this little bloog of a blog I promised myself I’d take a day off now and then.

Looks like I took one yesterday – in my pj’s no less.

Back to more weighty subjects tomorrow.

And thanks to The Vermont Country Store for the nightie.

Thanks to Lanz of Salzburg I really mean.

No thanks at all to elasticized undergarments and ironing ,neither of which came into play yesterday…

I know I’ve said before that I never wear those crazy Spanxy things. I once brought home an Extra Large one, just on trial, only to realize I couldn’t have gotten it on without removing a rib.

As I recall it wouldn’t even fit my cat who out-and-out refused to give it a try, even when I offered him fresh mice as payment.

As for the non-ironing in evidence here, that part surprised even me, since I iron the way some people do the Stations of the Cross.

But what can I say? A day off is a day off, right? And even your pets know that that’s precisely what weekends are FOR: just lettin’ it all hang out.

You can never go wrong talking fashion. Even if it’s just fashions in bras like we were saying yesterday, everybody’s got an opinion, right down to the babies, who never miss a chance to plunge their tiny hands down the front of your low-necked top.

Now let’s have a show of hands, speaking of hands: Who misses those awesome shoulder pads of the 1980s that were nothing but a revival of the shoulder pads of the 1940s?

I still wear the coat my mother wore as part of her ‘going away outfit’ as they used to call the post-nuptial ensemble. I have seen only one 40-second film of her and that mystery father of mine on their wedding day, coming down the stone steps at Longwood Towers where the reception was held.

I bet I’ve watched those 40 seconds a million times.There are no pictures of that snowy day; the photographer just never got there.

Mom had donned what she always referred to as a cerise-colored suit with pencil skirt and peplumed jacket under that black wool coat with its persian lamb lining. I found the coat in the attic of our childhood home after she died. The fur had deteriorated but I had it relined in heavy black satin and I wear it to this day, in part because even way back in the ’90s my kids were already slyly approaching me and trying to remove….. my SHOULDER PADS!

“But I need shoulder pads to symmetrisize my hips!” (That was my word for it: symmetrisize.)

“I need some bulk up at the here!” I told my girl Carrie who was rowing Crew in college at the time.

Her response: “Build up your delts.”

And so I have done.

Slowly slowly slowly, day by the day at the Y, in a group Strength class where the sight of others keep me going.

It’s a good system. Because aware as I am of the fact that shoulder pads are O-U-T out I still like them. And this way I get to wear ‘em on the inside where NO ONE can take them away heh heh.

I can’t find a picture of that wonderful coat but here’s the basic look. (I’m the cheeseball in the shorts with the weird bangs.)

The pads on that little monkey-suit were plenty w-i-i-i-d-e – and those were my moderate pre-workin’-out-at-the-Y days. This is how I’d look today:

You can never go wrong talking fashion. Even if it’s just fashions in bras, everybody’s got an opinion, right down to the babies, who never miss a chance to plunge their tiny hands down the front of your low-necked top.

Now let’s have a show of hands: Who misses those awesome shoulder pads of the 1980s that were nothing but a revival of the shoulder pads of the 1940s?

I still wear the coat my mother wore as part of her ‘going away outfit’ as they used to call the post-nuptial ensemble. I have seen only one 40-second film of her and that mystery father of mine on their wedding day, coming down the stone steps at Longwood Towers where the reception was held.

I bet I’ve watched those 40 seconds a million times.There are no pictures of that snowy day; the photographer just never got there.

Mom had donned what she always referred to as a cerise-colored suit with pencil skirt and peplumed jacket under that black wool coat with its persian lamb lining. I found it in the attic of our childhood home after she died. The fur had deteriorated but I had it relined in heavy black satin. I wear it to this day, in part because even way back in the ’90s my kids were already slyly approaching me and trying to remove….. my SHOULDER PADS!

“But I need shoulder pads to symmetrisize my hips!” (That was my word for it: symmetrisize.)

“I need some bulk up at the here!” I told my girl Carrie who was rowing Crew in college at the time.

Her response: “Build up your delts.”

And so I have done.

Slowly slowly slowly, day by the day at the Y, in a group Strength class where the sight of others keep me going.

It’s a good system. Because aware as I am of the fact that shoulder pads are O-U-T out I, for one, still like them. And this way I get to wear ‘em on the inside where NO ONE can take them away heh heh.

I can’t find a picture of that wonderful coat but here’s the basic look. (I’m the cheeseball in the shorts with the bangs.)

And here’s the style taken to its extreme:

We’re talkin’ the old days here, or we were yesterday. Back then I was built along the lines of Madmen’s Joan Harris, but it didn’t last long. Life has since sanded off a lot of that padding, which is fine with me.

I mean I’m not thin like the girl modeling the baby doll top from yesterday: the fattest thing about her is her belt buckle.  My situation is that even though I have been going to Weight Watchers for five years now I have yet to reach my lifetime goal even though we inched that goal up ten pounds to accommodate My Changing Body. (There’s a catalog with a name like that and it sets my teeth on edge. It’s for us older gals.)

If I’m skinny-looking at all I’m the keep-the lights-low-while-in-a-bathing-suit kind; the Skinny-With Cellulite kind and hey, why can’t that be a look?

But I’m not here to talk about my personal architecture.

I’m here to talk about bras.

And the best advice you can get about a bra is: SPEND THE MONEY. GET A GOOD ONE.

One of my daughters talked me into going to the Really Good Bra store once and then there was no turning back.

What they tell you at such a store is:

·         You may have all kinds of upholstery around your torso but what they measure is the size of your rib cage. They take that measuring tape and they s-q-u-e-e-ze until they can feel your bones, sunk under there like Lost Atlantis. They write that number down, take a glance at what you’ve got up front and come back with a bunch of bras that make you want to laugh out loud. They said I was a 32 bandwise, me, a person who has to head for the XL’s when it comes to tops.

·         The front of the bra has to touch your sternum. If it gaps out there, you need a bigger cup.

·         You have to clasp it low on your back for maximum lift in the front.

·         You have to bend forward way as you ease the thing on.

·         You can’t ever to put these babies in the washing machine and finally…

·         You have to come back to the Fancy Bra Store and keep buying bras there because costly as they might be, they certainly do do the job.

Save your pennies therefore. A picture is worth a thousand words, isn’t that what they say?

Get the bra that fits.

Always get the good bra:

See this look? I am now officially done with this look .

They ushered it in a few years ago but come on: We’re going to go back to wearing baby clothes? I mean this chick is skinny but most of us look like we’re in total baby clothes when we wear tops like this.

Or wait are they actually maternity tops?

Some of us remember the days when maternity clothes looked like baby clothes, smocking and all.

I look at pregnant women today with their form fitting t-shirts and think Good for you, kid! Let it show!”

Some of us are old enough to remember baby doll pajamas which looked like this.

And how about baby doll dresses? Peggy Olson appears in such a dress on Mad Men’s Season 5 Episode 7. She wears it to the dinner her boyfriend asks her to when she imagines he’s going to pop the question. (He pops the question all right only it turns out to be, as Joan later puts it, “Want to shack up?”)

It galled me to see her in that dress. Here she is getting so tough this season, drinking at work with the fellas and not batting an eye when that moron who does the art makes yet another reference to his private parts and now she shows up dressed like a child?

What was that in the 60s?

I’ll tell you what it was: it was an effort to infantilize us, make us into little sex kittens (minus the claws, minus the fangs) at a time when we were slowly but inexorably gaining power.

Nice try fellas. It worked, but only for a while. True, in the 70s we dressed like extras from Little House on the Prairie but then came power suits in the 80s. I’m not sure where we’ve gone since then; we can look at that another day. For now though let’s just regard these images and ask ourselves What on EARTH were we thinking? When I got married women 60 came to the wedding dressed like this! I was 21 and I knew enough to stay away from the look.

Since I was built more along the lines of Madman’s Joan, I stayed away from this look back in good old 20th century. So what made me fall for it in the 21st?

I recently stood on our little town common with 100 or so other people – also dogs, and babies, and pigeons busily vacuuming up whatever bits of food had fallen to the earth.

It was part of a national Stand against Racism event sponsored by the Y, an institution I had never thought to associate with social justice issues before now.

The night had been cold – in the 20s even, which is why people look so bundled up in spite of the leaves on the trees.

(It’s been a weird spring all right, hot in March and now all this chilly rain but by noon when gathered the sun was warming things up pretty well.)

I find it fun to look at the pictures you take at an event because they’re so weirdly moment to moment.

I mean here’s my friend Karen with her ‘oppose isms’ sign waving to the passing cars. That’s Robin beside her – she’s a pediatrician – and beside her Nancy.

And these are some of the young people (and also my right ear):

Video is funny too, only partly for way the man who edited it for posting is heard humming ‘We Shall Overcome’ right at the end.  It’s funny too for the lightning-faster glimpses you get of everybody – except for Sandy who directly addresses the camera for 20 or 25 of the 40-second clip. I mean I see only a glimpse of these guys I spend so much time with. I see myself only briefly next to Tristan and his sign.

Check it out it’s super-short:

It’s a homemade video but there it all is, you know? This unblinking witness.

I keep looking at it thinking I’m at Gettysburg in 1864 and we’re about to see Abe Lincoln take off that tall hat to briefly wipe his brow before putting  it back on to step to the platform and deliver that famous address. Call it a Forrest Gump feeling.

Below is a real-life Forest Gump talking to the young guys I spoke of. We all had dinner with him last month at the end of which someone asked him if he felt like the black Forrest Gump because of all he has seen and been part of it.

He knew Rosa Parks. He marched with Rosa Parks. He was also a bona fide member of the musician’s union when he was 12. This was long before his 45 years he spent as a thoracic surgeon at Winchester Hospital.

I keep going back to these images. I mean I was there  at this event. I’m saying I heard Tobi the fine trumpet player and saxophonist Dr. Gibson talking about how you keep your lip in shape – yet I was unaware of so much that I now see and hear here in this little harvest of images.

It just makes you wonder: how does anyone know what really happened? Who did who fire first at Lexington and Concord? Or the Boston Massacre? How do can anyone understand anything when we can see but a fraction of that Bigger PIcture? 

Here are some more good ways to embarrass your children. (For me, it’s a topic that never gets old.)

One, cook up a mess of fish right before you give them a ride home from school with their four new friends.

Two, for maximum effect, fry the fish. My sister almost died of embarrassment the time our mom did that.

Three, when in public settings, talk in a clear loud voice. You may think you’re talking in a normal, living-room sized voice but even that has too much volume for your kids. “Whisper!” they hiss at you. “M-o-o-o-m!’

My sixth grader laid down the law with me when it came to giving rides to the guys on his soccer team. (Mum: DON’T say funny things. In fact, don’t interact with my friends at all.” Don’t interact with them? Well THAT wasn’t going to happen. We talked, we laughed, while my own child sat rigid with dread in the front seat beside me.)

Four, wear out-of-date accessories, like the tiny backpack I bought back in the 90s which I should have known even then was designed for a much younger person.

What did I care though? I’ll take a tiny backpack any day over those bags you wear over one arm that have come into fashion more recently, you know the ones I mean. They’re what matrons wore in the 60s and early 70s. Pat Nixon wore them.

Now I knew Pat Nixon. I once rode down in an elevator with Pat Nixon. I’m no Pat Nixon, or anyway I didn’t want to be.

So here’s me still walking around with the tiny backpack, even if it does make me look like an organ grinder’s monkey.

Oh so that’s Five: Make out-of date references, like “organ grinder’s monkey.” I bet not one person in ten knows that a musician called an organ grinder once made money on the street by playing this instrument while his monkey, dressed in comical satiny get-ups, scampered about with a tin cup collecting coins from the crowd.

The other day I was eating lunch with the three high school freshmen in my life when one of them picked up my tiny backpack and said, “Wow! Cool vintage bag!”

That made me feel great – until I noticed this huge milk stain down one whole side of it from the thousand cups of drive-through coffee I buy in a month, then treat with my own travelling pint of Skim because I don’t trust that the people at the drive-through are really going to use Skim, even when I ask for it.

“I have milk all over my bag?!” was my first thought. “Oh God, is it breast milk?!” was my second thought. But no, it’s been a few years since we had that particular housekeeping problem. The mid-80s was it?

Such have been my tortured purse thoughts – until last week when I got an email from a mom who says she too had no idea her tiny backpack wasn’t cool.

“I’m glad you filled me in on how dorky it is but I love, love, love it! Having straps on both shoulders is the only thing that helps me feel balanced in my life. Also, I need both hands free to catch my four-year-old.”

Then she told me that hers was getting so worn out she just ordered a new one online, and was sending me a link to this cute NEW tiny backpack so I could do the same.

And I did, then and there. We dorky parents have to stick together, I figure. Plus SOMEONE’S got to entertain the kids, right?

me dressed to go out on the town

This is what I’ve been looking at for two days: the view out my bedroom window.

I hurt myself with that road trip Tuesday and Wednesday and the corkscrew that is now my back was twisting hard, trying to screw me straight into the floor.

I have a crookedness that has come upon me in the last five years. I looked like a straight little birch tree as a girl but now I;m changing and when it hurts it really hurts. It hurts especially when I don’t go to the Y and stretch the muscles symmetrically.

I looked out at this window at the clouds barging around the sky,

and the odd goose zipping past.

and the robins with their small clutching toes perching on Verizon’s big daddy of a cable and don’t the squirrels love that cable too!

They wobble on it with their bunched up bottoms and look like the Flying Wallendas, startling everyone below with their acrobatics.

And me, I lay on my back.

Then I hung off the edge of the bed to give a break to that that reverse cervical curve we all have as people forever holding the old bowling ball of a head forward to drive or squint at a screen.

I lay on my tummy and remembered my babyhood.

I lay on my right side and tried to reassemble in exact the detail face of the man who has been sleeping beside me all these years.

But when I lay on my left side and looked out this window, well: THAT’s when I began feeling better.

I sometimes think all we ever really need is a view of the sky.

If you had to write a composition about what you had learned when you spent a week with 20 teens in a tropical work camp I bet you’d have plenty to say: About what it’s like to share quarters with a million lizards say, not to mention a thousand palmetto bugs, who clung to every vertical surface in such numbers you came to think of them as wall art.  

You’d maybe mention the speed with which blisters can bubble up on hands that wield rakes, or the moist beauty of the rain forest breathing quietly beside you.

But the biggest thing I learned on my church’s Mission Trip to Puerto Rico I learned from the presence of Judy, the tall cool blue-eyed Minister of Youth and Parish Life, who led us all week and worked like a dog herself. The 20 kids and the three other adults worked like dogs too.

 I worked more like a Persian cat, or possibly a goldfish.

 I SHOULD have been hacking and chopping like everyone else and I knew that, but Judy had said it was enough that I was helping lead parts of our meditative 90-minute sessions every night. And I think it was this exemption from much of this hard labor that let me notice something I might have otherwise missed.

Spared so much of the grunt work I saw what the kids were really doing all week long: They were watching Judy, who just kept on smiling –

• When the plane was stalled on the tarmac for an hour.
• When the luggage didn’t make it onto our connecting flight at JFK.
• When we finally threaded through jungle darkness at 3am to settle into a temporary housing in a tiny bungalow, all 25 of us squeezed in to two tiny rooms.

I took one look at the ‘wall art’ that first night and slept fully clothed.  Not Judy. Judy showered, which meant she stood under a limp rope of cold water falling from a raw pipe, then donned her high-necked nightie and gathered us to read a Psalm together.

The kids saw how she reacted to things. All week long they saw her roll with every punch. She did this even on our big ‘night off’ when we drove 40 minutes to get to a dank and smelly harbor where we waded through a slimy tide to heave ourselves into kayaks fashioned out of what looked like leftover model airplane parts, so that we might paddle through a dark tunnel of vegetation and arrive in a glowing lagoon.

Straight into this tunnel we propelled ourselves. “Don’t let me tip over! Don’t let me tip over!”  I silently prayed as the bony roots of mangrove trees knuckled our heads like playground bullies.

But who actually fell in to the blood-warm swamp because the guide with his limited English said, “Quick, paddle right!” when he meant “Quick! Paddle left”? Judy did – and surfaced laughing, even while what she called her worst nightmare was being played out, as her six-foot self was being unceremoniously boosted back into her craft. 

From underneath.

By the hands of four well-meaning males.

So what did I learn afresh at this work camp in the tropics? That much as you might HOPE the young people in your company are listening to what you are trying to tell them, really they are doing something much more important:

Really they’re just watching you with their clear eyes, taking note and remembering how grownups react to things.

This isn’t actually us but it gives you the idea:

This was us – er. this was they. (I was just the one taking the pictures.)

I just drove 300 miles to bring Cameron here to one of the colleges where he was accepted so he could see if his future lay there.

It was Tuesday morning when I pointed the nose of my old red car west and fetched him off the train from the other school he was also looking at.

It was just a quick three-and-a half hours and there he was, right on the platform.

We loaded up on bottled water and sandwiches at the station and coasted south to a second college – where he was immediately welcomed by current students and absorbed into campus life.

I, meanwhile, spent a fantastic evening with these two and their baby, all three of whom have come to feel to me as much like my own kids as those with whom I share genetic material.

We four ate in a made-over church, now a restaurant called Terrapin.  Talk about wonderful food!  Even their baby got into the spirit of fun, though you can’t tell by this shot:

(What is that where the wackier the parent acts the more the child looks out at the world with that Jack Benny deadpan? ((No I don’t mean that. This little girl was just playing the straight man here; as far as I can tell she normally smiles unstoppably. She could be the Hair Club President with all the happy smiling she does in a day. (Remember that Hair Club For Men ad where the smiling guy with the gorgeous waves reveals at the end that really he’s bald as an egg? I loved that ad.))

Anyway then yesterday Cameron did various other things while I mostly sat in the car which I well know how to do as a diehard Vacationer in Her Driveway. These are my feet sticking out the window.

Finally he got to where he felt he had seen all he needed to see he said and sensed all he needed to sense; and so at 4pm, with a fresh wind out of the west tossing the new leaves, we made one last stop in the college book store and bought a T-shirt with the name of the school emblazoned on the front.

“This is the place” Joseph Smith said when he first saw that old Salt Lake in Utah. If I helped Cameron get any closer to feeling that about the school he will go to in the fall then I’m more than happy.

I say take public transportation whenever you can. Whether you’re at the bus stop, the train station or the airport, you’ll see the great spectacle of life passing before you.

On the bus or subway, the dramas are especially vivid, each one as fleeting as a 30-second ‘improv’ sketch as people get on and off at the various stops.

I think of the man the subway, peering into his daily planner, a panicked look on his face. Because I was squished up against him, I thought I knew why he was frowning: the words “Send flowers, Mom’s birthday!” appeared scrawled across the page devoted to today’s tasks.

“Did you forget?” I just had to ask. “Oh GOD!” he answered. “But I can still call, right?”

I think of the young woman swaying with the turns as she rode the bus in Cambridge Massachusetts.  Over one shoulder she sported an M.I.T.  backpack and just under its nylon strap, high on the round of her right deltoid, a vivid tattoo of  the Infinity symbol, and how nice THAT was, to ride along with someone on such intimate terms with the boundless.

On the train things are different, since you have time to really notice things.

One thing I notice, after that initial rocking interlude when the train is pulling out of the station, is how fond people are of carving private space out of public space. Young people especially think nothing of travelling with bedroom accoutrements, meaning pillows and even stuffed animals. When they can, people of every age will stretch out across all three seats for a snooze.

And then we come to air travel, which feels different from the other two modes of moving.

With air travel folks get much more sociable: Last week I saw a little boy on the Jetway talking to his toy plane as we all waited to board.

“He turned four yesterday. This is his first time flying,” the child’s mother said to the stranger standing behind them.

“Really? Only four and you’re a pilot already?” the stranger said with a look of pretend astonishment.

The child looked up at him, looked away, then looked up again as if deciding he just had to say it:

“I’m not FLYING the plane. Look at me; I’m little!”

Meanwhile, an older guy with a big front porch told everyone he had just bought his ticket last night.

“Get out! What did you pay?” the woman beside him demanded.

“$200,” said the man.

She gasped. “I paid twice that!”

“I’m sorry darlin’!” he replied, all but taking her hand to express his regret over life’s unfairness.

Of course once you’re on a plane other dynamics manifest themselves.

Sometimes people not on the aisle try to get on the aisle by asking you to switch seats, if you have that lucky spot. My advice, if you wish to remain there? Pull out some paperwork and scowl importantly into it.

Sometimes you get next to a person who just can’t stop talking. That’s how I learned you’re not dying unless you have seen a vision of ’the pastoral scene with an angel.’ Who knew?

And sometimes two people who have never before met find themselves laughing their heads off and leaning in toward one another to say things you’re pretty sure have nothing to do with flight information.

In short, we all act very human on our public conveyances, and I love watching us do it. In fact I love it here on earth generally. Maybe I’ll get the recycling symbol inked on my arm so I can keep coming back forever like that four year-old pictures us all doing.

This is a clip from National Geographic where two British historians talk about birth control methods that might have been used on the Titanic. Washed up on the shores so to speak and God bless the historians; they are so meticulous.

I’ll let you get right to the link which you have to click on – this is not on YouTube but rather on National Geographic’s own site.

Let’s hear it for these two young British women talking in such a calm and enlightened way about how ’this is a con-dom,’ as they pronounced it, “which was tied on with a pink sort of ribbon.”

They tell how another birth control method of the day was “coughing very strongly after sex . To expel the semen.” Then they both laugh ruefully.

I also know from stories in my own family that some women also douched with Lysol to prevent conception. (Lysol! One elderly family member told me she was sure that’s how her older sister wound up with the uterine cancer that necessitated her early-in-life hysterectomy.)

People have a thousand opinions about abortion but I think virtually everyone sees it as a very poor last resort.

And isn’t it strange that all these years into the modern age we still don’t have a truly safe and effective method of birth control?

Anyway here is some guy’s ‘con-dom’, made of sheep intestine and tied on with a sweet pink bow. (There’s an ad first but it lasts only about 20 seconds.)

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/national-geographic-channel/specials-1/titanic-100-years/ngc-historical-birth-control/

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday and also the birthday of my third and final child, who was christened with waters from the river Avon where old Will lived. (My pals Jacquie and Lew brought some over in a tiny vial when they were in England the months before we dunked him.)

Old Will is the guy who brings me to Cambridge MA once a month to participate in readings aloud of his plays in their entirety if you please by a group so ancient and venerable Longfellow’s daughter belonged to it in the 1880s. Grave Alice herself or was it Laughing Allegra or ­­Edith with Golden Hair. That’s from Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour,” a poem whose first eight or ten lines every schoolchild in America once knew by heart in that golden age when we all walked to school, uphill, both ways.

I rarely feel grave when I am with these people. In fact I’m sometimes smiling so much I miss my cue. Except when I have a part that you’re supposed to sing because of how obvious it is that it was written as a song. The Wind and the Rain from “Twelfth Night” that’s one. And Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies, which I had to sing when I drew the part of Ariel in “The Tempest” Also,hilariously, Where the Bee Sucks There Suck I

Terrified at the prospect of having to sing all alone, in public, I got right to work scouring the internet until I found a CD with the songs of Shakespeare, played that sucker in my car for two weeks solid until I had both tunes memorized by playing it ten million times in my car. Where the Bee Sucks There Suck I, I’ll never forget it and when my turn came well I got through it but only because one person sand along with me who is British and has been singing these songs all her life.

At our last meeting we read Henry V which I missed because of our death. I was to play the part of Mistress Quickly, bawdy sort of wench who gets off more double entendres than Charlie Sheen did in the original Two and a Half Men. Choice role!

It’s all choice; everyone thinks so: We did an in-group survey the summer before last where we were asked to reflect on what the group means to us. One person cited “the Bard’s poetry and jaw-dropping use of the King’s English.”

A second person spoke of how “totally engrossed” he becomes in whatever character he is assigned to play “I try to figure out where I have seen this person before and what kind of a person he was/is and what I think is going on with him. That exercise is, in itself, diverting. Then the challenge of trying to pull it off in the actual reading occupies me fully. Added to that is the double enjoyment of the fellowship and of sharing in experiences which meant so much to my parents.” (His parents! And he is in his 80′s! )

And a third said he treasures “the warm, mutually-supportive, endlessly-interesting people who open their homes to each other and feed each other. (Should have said that we also feast hugely once the reading is done.) “I love Cantabrigian Yankees, who are gracefully frank or discreet as the case may be and appreciate pleasure, including the pleasures of disputation.. I love that we all are committed to a project of a ritual and aesthetic revelation of the noble and evil heart of mankind.”

Well said ! So here’s to that great old figure born on April 23, 1564. And here’s to the great-in-my-mind new figure who, even as a little boy, had a fine sense of theatre himself.

And now… Where the Bee Sucks, just so you can appreciate the challenge. I transformed myself into a youthful person for this performance. (We really good actors, we know how to do that.

You could be sad on a dark day like this, cold and wet as it is, but only if you took the short view.  

Of course it’s hard not to take the short view with a three-day blow coming in and so many of last year’s dead leaves still carpeting the earth, some even still clinging to the branches, waiting on this  wild strong wind to shake them loose and return them to the mother.

But if you take the long view you see what’s happening under those dead leaves. Violets right there in the woods! And is that poison ivy peeking out with shiny face?

It all starts over. Any child will remind you of that.

The other day I spent a few hours walking around a pond with two young children who have just witnessed their first death, that of Uncle Ed as we all called him, though he was grand-uncle to them.

“I’m sad,” the little one, who is four going on five. We were walking along picking up rocks and winging them into the water

“Why are you sad?” I asked him.

“I’m sad because Uncle Ed died.”

“Ah I’m sad about that too!” I said. “But lots of people think we go right to Heaven when we die and see all our favorite people. The ones who died before us I mean.”

“And lots of people think you come back as a baby.” he said.

“That’s right! Lots of people believe in that. They call that reincarnation.”

“I think this is what happens,” he said brightening. “You’re a baby, then you’re a kid, then you’re a grownup, then you’re an uncle and then you die. Then you start again: baby, kid, teenager, (I forgot teenager)  grownup, uncle!”  I didn’t have the heart to interrupt and point out that his own actual uncle is a young guys in his 20s. “I think you come back and come back  - again and again!”

“Wouldnt that be wonderful!” I said and suddenly those lines from Birches came into my mind where the speaker in that Robert Frost poem says, “Earth’s the right place; I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

The right place for love and the right place for letting go,  I thought .

I’m having a hard time with that second part but I find comfort in company like this, meaning the company of Frost and these children.

Here are the children from our day together:

The little one is the one with all this talk.

The big one just said “TT, well your brain never dies. We know that!”

And then I thought of this poem, also by Frost, that wrote itself on my own spongy grey hard drive back when I was a girl and read poetry the way other people eat. It’s called In Hardwood Groves.

The same leaves over and over again! They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.
Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed. 

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is way in ours.  
 
All I can say is thank God for the young, who see things the rest of us miss.

Remember ‘Don’t say ain’t, your mother will faint, your father will fall in a bucket of paint. your sister will cry, your brother will die, your dog will call the FBI?’

Well I fell in a bucket of paint Wednesday night, or rather my IPod did. Can you imagine?  My IPod Touch that cost so much? That I put a mirrorlike screen protector on so it would shine like crow’s bait in whatever dark place and never get lost? “NO NO NO NO NO!”  was all I could think.

And I hadn’t even said ‘ain’t’.   All I did I had done was to try for that last run down the mountain that smacked me into the tree. All I did was take my little craft out on the sea even though I should have known better with those storms clouds gathered on the horizon.

In other words what I had done was keep working on that darned refinishing project even though my back hurt and my hands were cramping up and I had to kneel to get at the bureaus chest and lie down to get it its undercarriage.

It wasn’t exactly paint, it was polyurethane.

I had on my carpenter’s overalls and had tucked my iPod into the chest pocket, dummy that I was, I normally work it into that inner corner of my bra where I keep my Bluetooth. Nothing ever falls out of there.

But no I had to put it in my chest pocket of those overalls. And I was tired at the end of this nerve-wracking hour of applying the final finish. Nerve-wracking because you have so much in the piece by then: the hour of stripping, the sanding, the rubbing in of the stain, the rubbing off of all excess stain, the first coat of poly, the gentle roughing up with fine sandpaper, the second coat of poly, the even gentler application of sandpaper or even fine steel wool and finally finally, finally that last coat of Minwax Glo Satin

That’s what I was on that very last coat. And that’s when I leaned too quickly forward and plop! In it fell, into a gooey three-inch-deep polymer bath consisting of a chain of organic units joined by urethane links.”

I gasped and grabbed it out.

Maybe its holster will have protected it! I thought. I looked at that mirrored plastic screen protector, now gummy and opaque and quick peeled it off. And …. the IPod kept on playing

And wonder of wonders the IPod is still playing these 36 hours later though it now has the image of a dark tornado imprinted on its face. Now every time I look down at it I say Oh yeah I remember: Don’t take your little boat out when storm clouds are gathering,  DON’T make that last run of the day when you’re tired and the light on the mountain is failing, and especially DON’T regard as secure any pouch or pocket above the waist unless you are absolutely SURE you’re not going to be bending over.

I love Dear Abby; her advice is always so good. Yesterday she counseled a woman on what to say when people tell her she looks just like her mother. The trouble, the woman said, is “my mother is ugly! I no longer respond to the comment, preferring to remain silent and just stare at the person instead.”

Then she went on to ask Abby to “please remind people that unless the comparison is to an attractive model, opinions should be kept to oneself.” And she signed it “BEAUTIFUL IN MY OWN WAY.”

Abby was much kinder than I would have been. “The trouble is your mother is ugly?” I would have written “Are you serious?”

To me no human face is ugly. If the six years I spent studying Anatomy and Physiology to work that second job as a massage therapist taught me anything they taught me that there are no ugly bodies either, but only valiant, hard-working bodies that try so hard every day to do our bidding, whatever crazy head-forward and/or slouching positions we ask them to maintain. (You’d be surprised how many people feel shame about their feet. And yet little was more moving to me in the course of the hour-long session than to hold a person’s foot in my hand for there is visible all the gathered strength and balance we demand every day to go on clinging to the branch, to set out from it in search of food, to catch and settle upon it afterward and attempt to take our rest.)

What Abby did instead of scolding her was to say instead

DEAR BEAUTIFUL IN YOUR OWN WAY:

I’ll remind them, but it’s possible that you are overly sensitive. The person could be referring to a family resemblance, your coloring or a mannerism. A diplomatic response would be, ‘Thank you. Isn’t she a dear?’

I might stop with the “Thank you,” just in case Mom isn’t all that much of a dear, in which case the daughter would seem to be engaging in sarcasm.

I do wonder though: if the daughter feels as though she can call own self beautiful in her own way, why can’t she see that that might be true of her mother as well?

You know I’ve been thinking of Mother Teresa all this week. Who could fail to see her beauty as she went about her work as a pencil in the hand of God? I’d be happy to look like her any day.

This is an easy day: April 18th is the day Paul Revere and William Dawes rode out to warn the colonials that the British were marching, armed. In my part of the world there are signs all over saying they passed this spot and this spot and this one. When I was young I would think, I hope they went through the traffic lights!

People IN Concord and Lexington do this anniversary up big. The third Monday in April is called Patriots Day, in fact, which we celebrate by calling off school, shuttering scads of businesses and playing host to a little thing called the Boston Marathon.

I’m only a few hills and meadows away from Concord and Lexington so I went there one April 18, in 1975, in the middle of the night like Dawes and Revere, with my sister Nan, my cousin Sheil and our three young husbands.

Gerald Ford was coming to the Old North Bridge to kick off what would be the near-two-year-long celebration of the Bicentennial of America’s birth and we wanted to see him do it. We gathered at Nan and Tom’s house, donned tri-cornered hat, grabbed a great quantity of beer and drove the 8 miles to Concord. We spent the night playing cards in the car and at 5 am embarked in three canoes onto the Concord River; paddled downstream to the bridge and waited and waited and waited until the President showed up, his head a distant balding egg.
We saw Caroline Kennedy, sprung from Concord Academy for the day, and heard the speeches blowing across the water. (Here’s Caroline now, with Jackie, Rose and Ted as she was graduating from that school.

It was the beginning of something big all right, the reenactment of the battle, the first visit of the Tall Ships to our harbor and, for me, an Elton John concert on the Fourth of July 1976 at the stadium where the Pats still play, with Kiki Dee doing the opening act.

So there it is for This Day in History..

Oh! I also know that the longest game in professional baseball happened on this day too, played by two teams in the Triple A League in Pawtucket RI. It lasted for 33 innings and took almost eight and a half hours to finish and that’s nice too and pretty American as well.
But what I’ll always remember about this date is laughing my head off all night in a parking lot, then easing into a craft onto water as silvery and smooth as mercury in the pre-dawn light.

I’ll also vividly remember Kiki Dee doing Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart with Elton. I had a slight bump under my hippie dress that by December 31st would become my first child who I knew would end forever my days drinking and laughing until sunup.
It was fine.
I was ready, though I knew even then that life would go breakin’ my heart, as Life does, but maybe I knew too there would also be fun, and bright mornings, and toe-tapping music. Here are the two singing that great song now: